Other Parts Discussed in Post: TDC1000, CC3100

LaunchPad will be at the heart of many demos @ CES 2015. Here's a quick glimpse at one of the demos that will be showcased.

In this demo, we are using several TI components to create an internet-connected water level monitoring system.

Using the TDC1000, we are able to measure the amount of fluid in a tank with "time of flight". The TDC1000 is able to generate a pulse that is related to the amount of time it takes for a transmitted sound to reflect back from the top surface of water. This generated pulse is able to be measured by a microcontroller.

In this case, we are using the high-resolution timers available on the C2000 microcontroller device to measure the width of the Time of Flight pulse generated by the TDC1000. One that reading is available, we send it to an MSP430 microcontroller via UART.

The MSP430 microcontroller is paired with the CC3100 Wi-Fi BoosterPack. Once the latest readings are received via UART, the MSP430 publishes the data to the cloud via MQTT with the help of the CC3100 device.

Once published to the cloud via MQTT, we used a cloud-side GUI tool called freeboard to visualize our readings. This cloud-side GUI allows us to remotely monitor our readings & control the system remotely. The GUI also includes a few other features like triggering tweets & datalogging to a mongoDB database every hour.

You can learn more about the TDC1000 here: www.ti.com/product/tdc1000

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